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Team members:

• Robert Benson
• David Hover
• Paul Niewoonder
• Jonathan Tate

For our project, we will design an embedded software graphics accelerator. At its heart will be a custom media-centric co-processor design, referred to as the shader unit. Compared to other processor designs, the shader unit will have very high floating-point computational performance by exploiting the parallel nature of groups of dependent, sequential instructions. We will also develop a programmable software-based 3D graphics pipeline. The graphics accelerator will utilize several general-purpose processors and many of our shader units, each running different parts of the software graphics pipeline. We will develop the embedded graphics accelerator on our own custom-built multi-FPGA development board that will include a VGA port, knobs, and buttons for user interaction. At minimum, we will write software to demonstrate the functionality of the hardware, such as static graphical rendering examples, and display the output from industry standard benchmark programs. Additionally, if time permits, we will write several simple graphical games such as "snake," "Tetris" and "etch-a-sketch" to demonstrate some real-time examples.